We shook hands and his was so thin and white I felt worse than ever.
"Skipper," he says, "I can't thank—"
"No need to thank me," I cut in. "If you've got to thank anybody, thank Mary Blaisdell. She's been the brains of that eatin'-house concern ever since I took hold of it. She's a wonder, that woman. If she'd been my own sister she couldn't have done more. I wish she was."
He looked at me, pretty queer.
"Skipper," says he, smilin', "if you wish that you're a bigger chump than I've been, and that's sayin' a heap."
What in the world he meant by that I didn't know—but I didn't ask him. Not that I didn't think. I'd been thinkin' a lot of foolish things lately, but you could have cut my head off afore I said 'em out loud, even to myself.
He came down to the store the next mornin' and the sight of it seemed to be the very tonic he needed. He got better day by day and pretty soon was his own brisk self again. "The Sign of the Windmill"—by the way, I'd changed the name on my own hook and 'twas the "Sign of the Bluefish" now—done fust rate all through the fall and when we closed it we was sure that next summer it would be a little gold mine for us. In fact, everything in the trade line looked good, by-products and all, and I ought to have been a happy man. But I wa'n't exactly. Somehow or other I couldn't feel quite contented. I didn't know what was the matter with me and when I hinted as much to Jacobs he just looked at me and laughed.
"You're lonesome, that's what's the matter with you," he says. "You're too good a man to be boardin' at a one-horse ranch like the Poquit."
"I'll admit that," says I. "I'll give in that I'm next door to an angel and ought to wear wings, if it'll please you any to have me say so. And the Poquit ain't a paradise, by no means. But I've sailed salt water for the biggest part of my life and it ain't poor grub that ails me."
"Who said it was?" says he. "I said you were lonesome. You ought to have a home."